Digital Inspiration posted about a set of 900+ interviews that Michael Stelzner did to Internet Marketers to find out how marketers are using social media to grow their businesses.  On the report, he also found the top 10 social media questions marketers want answered, including what social media tools are most popular, how they are using social media, what are the benefits of using social media, etc.

The results are interesting. Regarding the most popular social media tools: Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn and Facebook are the favorites.

As for the benefits of using social media, marketers answered the following:

If you are planning to jump into the social media, you might want to take a look at the full report.  Here.

The Inspiration Room has published a great collection of blogs focused on advertising and marketing around the world and sorted by country/region.  Check it out.

It is not always so easy for a company to figure out its own online presence or the one from their competitors.  When building an Online Marketing/PR strategy it is always necessary to know who is talking about you and what they are saying.  It is also important to know who is talking about your competitors and what it is been said.

I recently collaborated in a Digital Footprint study for a well known software company, the study was focused on Mexico and Latin America and it was intended to identify the blogs, sites, and at the end, people, who were talking about the company and its brands.  The results are confidential, but they will enable the company to generate a strategy to start a relationship, or even a direct conversation with them.

The tools we used were almost all from Google, but there are also other online tools out there that can help you figure out what size your (or your competitors’) Digital Footprint is. Bryan Eisenberg compiled last year a set of 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition:

1. Statbrain – To determine the number of visitors a website has based on an algorithm an different information sources.

2. AideRSS – To find out which blog posts and topics are engaging people.

3. FeedCompare – To compare the size of  your feed to others.

4. Xinu Returns – To get a report on how well a site is doing on popular search engines.

5. Google Trends For Websites – To find how often a set of topics have been searched in Google over time.

For the rest of the list, click here.